Former Overwatch game director and one-time face of the brand Jeff Kaplan left Blizzard Entertainment in 2021, after 19 years at the company. He’s been quietly working on another game since leaving, and recently spoke about his decision to leave Blizzard, the company he once thought he “would retire from.” Unsurprisingly, Kaplan has revealed that the catalyst for his departure from Blizzard and Overwatch was what many expected: corporate meddling and unchecked greed by parent company Activision Blizzard.
Kaplan appeared on the Lex Fridman podcast on Wednesday for a five-hour interview, during which he touched on his early career at Blizzard, his work on World of Warcraft, and the highs and lows of Overwatch. While Kaplan mostly displays a fondness for his time working at Blizzard, he identifies where things started to go wrong with Overwatch and what ultimately led to his resignation.
“The major derail was Overwatch League,” Kaplan said, referring to the now-shuttered esports league founded in 2017. As a result of Activision Blizzard over-selling Overwatch League, the “executive pressure was monumental,” he said.
“There was a lot of excitement about Overwatch League. Like, too much,” Kaplan recalled. “It got over-marketed to the people buying the teams. They went on this roadshow […] and they were pretty much selling the Brooklyn Bridge, that Overwatch League was going to be more popular than the NFL.”
After billionaire investors bought into the league, to the tune of $20 million, they started demanding new features in Overwatch that the development team wasn’t equipped to handle — at least not while they were trying to run Overwatch as a live game and grow it. Building Twitch integration, camera control for broadcasts, and uniforms for OWL teams strained the Overwatch team, Kaplan said.
“All your plans at that point kind of go out the window,” Kaplan said. “You’re not working on new world events, you’re not really even focused on Overwatch 2, you’re just kind of treading water.”
